Are you a marketer who views marketing purely as lead generation - a numbers game? 

My view is that marketing is so much more, it's branding and building sustainable marketing practices that build businesses based on increasing revenue and decreasing costs to improve profit margins. 

If your view of marketing is that it's only a numbers game, for example;  you make 10 calls to book in one meeting, or you send out 10,000 emails to get a 1% click thru rate - I'd like to challege you to think about the 90+% who aren’t interested? Why aren’t they interested? And what is this doing to your brand?

I believe the number one focus of your marketing is to build a brand that people love. The challenge is, how do you do that and achieve your marketing objectives? 

What are the words that come to mind when you think about brands you love: 

1. Valuable
2. Quality
3. Trustworthy
4. Knowledgeable
5. Reliable

Your marketing message may be in the form of an; email, blog, advertisement or phone call, but if you’re not confident it meets the qualities of a brand that people love, then rethink your strategy and message. The short term gains aren’t worth the damage to your brand, and long term business objectives.

Here are some examples:

You send out a weekly email to your database of 10,000 contacts that you’ve built over the past 5 years. A mix of purchased lists, people you’ve met and third party lists. Your goal is to get 1% open rate, and of that a 5% click thru rate to your offer. If you get 5 leads from each email campaign you reach your marketing goals and everyone is happy.  But here’s how you can improve your email campaign to build a brand that people love and will share.

1. You realize that of the 10,000 contacts – many are old, have never opened your email let alone clicked on your offers – so you decide to remove all contacts who haven’t interacted with your company in the past 6 months. This reduces your list of contacts to 1,000. 
2. With the 1,000 contacts you now have, look at the criteria you have for each contact, do you know job titles, company descriptions, customer v’s leads, items purchase etc.
3. Send out an email with a special offer that is relevant to their need – if it's not relevant don’t send them the email. Or you may offer the same thing but the value or benefit maybe different depending on their job responsibilities; for a manager it might be improving productivity, for someone higher up the food chain it might be reducing costs. Tailor your offer to suit their individual need.
4. Rather than focusing the entire email around the offer. Start by establishing trust and credibility by sharing a short story or link to your blog that provides education to help them do their job better.
5. At the bottom of the article or on the side place the offer.

Marketing Tip: If your weekly or monthly emails come through as educational articles your audience is more likely to find this valuable and worthy of sharing, and/or responding.

The same approach can be taken for cold calling. Rather than interrupting someone's day - who does not know you. Create an offer like a free ebook download, write a blog article to promote the ebook, put a CTA on your home page and blog, plus advertise the ebook on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn to your target audience. This approach will help to build a list of contacts who are interested in your company, product or service. Then place a courtesy phone call to everyone who downloaded the ebook. This  will achieve your first goal of talking to potential customers on the phone, and will build a brand based on thought leadership, trust and credibility.

What are your thoughts or questions? How do you achieve your lead generation goals, whilst building a quality brand?